There was a piece on 'You and Yours' yesterday about the re-opening of the Hatfield Colliery in S.Yorks. Ex coal miner, Richard Budge took on the colliery in 2002, mothballed it in 2004 and is now re-opening it with ?100M finance, partly from Russia. He reckons there is in excess of 100m tonnes of coal in the pit and because coal prices have followed gas and oil, it is profitable to mine it again. He intends to build a ?800M gasification power plant on the site and 'capture the CO2 to use for enrichment of oil reserves in the North Sea'. (Quite how the CO2 will be transported from S. Yorks to North Sea oil fields, I'm not sure. Can anyone help with the geography and logistics of this?) What he doesn't use in the power station on site, he reckons he has sold whatever he mines for the next 6 years

The power station is planned for completion by 2009, generating by 2010.
He also quoted the stat of 50% of our power from coal over last 6 months and he is hopeful that the Energy Review will bring about new support for clean coal power stations as part of a diverse energy mix including nuclear. Wind power is a no no for the coal man. "What would you buy in your life, for your home that works one day in three and you don't know which day? - Because that is a wind farm."

A chap from Europcoal then confirmed that Britain has working and mothballed collieries that could provide 10's of millions of tonnes and last at least 20 years. What is needed, he says, is a commitment from the Energy Review that helps give confidence to investors to support deep mining projects. 1/3 of our electricity came from coal last year. 40% of the coal was from the UK.

Now, given that average daily output from the mine is 19,000 tonnes, so monthly = 570,000 tonnes and industrial sector price for leccy in Pennsylvania is currently 6.2 cents/kWh, I make that 2823 MWh per month and 5kWh per tonne of coal. 1 tonne of coal can produce approx 7300 kWh electricity so that doesn't look too bad. If the power station is on site, transport isn't a great issue. What might I have missed, apart from the fact that I am deriving my information from an insect?

I don't know where that 50% of electricity from coal over the last 5/6 months came from... the latest data from the DTI is for January and although the coal burn is up more than 21.1% up between Nov04/Dec04/Jan05 and Nov05/Dec05/Jan06 it's still only 46% compared with 39% the year before.

Chapter Ten, she raises some very valid points regarding Carbon Sequestration. Not only has it taken decades to achieve partial success in the capture of sulphur dioxide (a tiny fraction of coal content). But because carbon is the essence of the millions of tonnes of coal that is burnt every day, capturing carbon dioxide presents technical challenges of a much higher order of magnitude.

She also takes about the MASSIVE quantities of CO2 that need to be disposed of, and the effect of this on the EROEI of coal. Researchers apparently think that the deep ocean may be the only place big enough (not good for the ecology of this zone however).

To have any faith at all in carbon sequestration, though, it appears we would have to set up a tremendous system of international governmental oversight to ensure compliance. Every company and every country would be faced with a strong, ongoing economic incentive simply to vent the CO2 to the air instead of the expense of, say, hauling it to the nearest ocean or salt mine and pumping it to the depths. Since CO2 mixes so thoroughly in the global environment, cheating this way would be incredibly hard to detect absent near-constant oversight by some (incorruptible) regulatory authority.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 ? Within the next few years, power companies are planning to build about 150 coal plants to meet growing electricity demands. Despite expectations that global warming rules are coming, almost none of the plants will be built to capture the thousands of tons of carbon dioxide that burning coal spews into the atmosphere.

Environmentalists are worried, but they put their faith in a technology that gasifies the coal before burning. Such plants are designed, they say, to be more adaptable to separating the carbon and storing it underground.

Most utility officials counter that the gasification approach is more expensive and less reliable, but they say there is no need to worry because their tried-and-true method, known as pulverized coal, can also be equipped later with hardware to capture the global warming gas.

But now, influential technical experts are casting doubts on both approaches.

?The phrases ?capture ready? and ?capture capable? are somewhat controversial,? said Revis James, the director of the energy technology assessment center at the Electric Power Research Institute. ?It?s not like you just leave a footprint for some new equipment.?